Ant Colony Optimization for Operating Room Scheduling: Improved Efficiency and Resource Management

Operating Room Scheduling Problem (ORSP) involves determining the start times of surgeries and allocating the necessary resources while considering various constraints to ensure smooth operation, resource availability, and the expertise of medical personnel. This process is vital for providing timely patient care and maintaining efficient hospital resource utilization. We propose using the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic for solving this problem. Numerical experiments were conducted on five test cases of varying sizes and resource availability. The results demonstrate that our proposed ACO algorithm outperformed the literature results in terms of makespan, overtime, and the variation coefficient of working time of the used resources.